Looking up: The Logan will offer a bar with a view
The Logan's Assembly bar will feature a stunning vista stretching from the Cathedral Basilica of SS. Peter and Paul, across to the Free Library and the Franklin Institute, and all the way up the Parkway to the Art Museum.
One customary perk of city life is sorely lacking in Philadelphia: public dining/bar spaces with great views from up high.
There's R2L on the 37th floor of Two Liberty Place, Nineteen (XIX) on the 19th floor of the Bellevue, and SkyBrunch on the 50th floor at the Top of the Tower. Though only on the fourth floor of the Marketplace Design Center, Bistro St. Tropez also offers a pretty view of the Schuylkill and 30th Street Station.
Add one more:
The Logan, the luxe hotel opening in December on the former site of the Four Seasons Hotel on Logan Square, will have a rooftop bar on the ninth floor. (The ninth floor? Yes. BLT Architects extended the elevator shaft one floor higher. In the olden days, workers requiring roof access would take the lift to 8 and hoof it up a flight of stairs.)
Accessible from the hotel and from the street by dedicated elevators, the Assembly bar will feature a stunning vista stretching from the Cathedral Basilica of SS. Peter and Paul, across to the Free Library and the Franklin Institute, and all the way up the Parkway to the Art Museum.
The bar, which will have windows to allow for all-weather operation, will take up about half the hotel's roof.
The rest will be used to grow vegetables for Urban Farmer, the steakhouse that will be The Logan's signature restaurant. The hotel also will have a bee colony for local honey.
Urban Farmer, developed by Denver's Sage Restaurant Group, will occupy much of the footprint of the former Fountain Restaurant.
Main entry will be through new doors on Logan Circle; the developers and city engineers came up with a car-friendly entrance. And in a radical move, new windows have been punched through the granite facade to allow restaurant patrons to see the square, correcting one of the old design's flaws. (The former Swann Lounge, incidentally, has been converted to meeting space.)
The hotel lobby, accessible through the hotel's familiar porte-cochère on the 18th Street side, will have a full bar, as well as a library-type lounge leading out to a redeveloped courtyard.